Andrew leads the Human Gene Editing R&D group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. After obtaining his PhD at the MRC-LMB with Andrew Travers on the role of chromatin remodelling in heterochromatin formation, his postdoctoral work focused on the role of small RNAs in targeting chromatin modifications with David Baulcombe in Cambridge, and the function of long non-coding RNA molecules with Chris Ponting and Ji-Long Liu at the MRC-FGU in Oxford. Here he was one of the first to develop CRISPR in Drosophila. He then set up Genome Engineering Oxford at the Dunn School of Pathology, and was involved in projects including the production of sgRNA libraries, and development of methods to investigate miRNA target site functionality in vivo. He has subsequently applied genome editing to different species, the modification of the epigenetic and transcriptional status of a cell, and developed methods to improve the efficiency and specificity of the technology. He is continuing to develop genome engineering techniques in human pluripotent stem cells, with a particular interest in understanding regulation of gene expression in development and neurodegenerative disease including the design and application of a variety of pooled and arrayed CRISPR screening approaches.
Andrew Bassett, Wellcome Sanger
